Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 5, 2020
Date Accepted: Jul 22, 2020
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A Personalized Voice-based Diet Assistant for Caregivers of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias
ABSTRACT
Background:
The pace of population aging around the world is increasing dramatically. The world’s aging population is expected to increase prevalent cases of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). Proper nutrition and good eating behavior show great promise in preventing and slowing the progression of ADRD, and consequently improve ADRD patients’ health status and quality of life. As most of ADRD care is provided by informal caregivers, assisting caregivers to manage ADRD patients’ diet is important.
Objective:
This study aimed to design, develop, and test an Artificial Intelligence-powered voice assistant to help informal caregivers to manage the daily diet of ADRD patients, and to learn food and nutrition-related knowledge.
Methods:
The voice assistant is implemented through several steps: (1) construct a comprehensive knowledgebase including meta-level ontologies define ADRD diet care and user profiles, which is further extended with external knowledge graphs , (2) manage conversation between users and the virtual assistant, (3) provide personalized ADRD diet services through a semantics-based knowledge graph search and reasoning engine.
Results:
The voice assistant was evaluated in the lab environment through a variety types of use cases. Preliminary qualitative test results demonstrate a reasonable dialog success rate and recommendation correctness rate.
Conclusions:
The voice-based assistant provides a natural interactive interface with users and it does not require any technical background which may be an obstacle for senior caregivers to use new technologies to benefit their daily care tasks. This study suggests the feasibility of using the intelligent voice assistant to help caregivers to manage ADRD patients’ diet. Clinical Trial: NA
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